Open Source Geek

I have been working on a new project for work that I thought I would share with you. At work our Music on Hold devices (the things that provide music when you are put on hold) have been going faulty regularly. The device we currently use is a Fortune 2000 MOH from Rocom. It retails for about £260 If you are considering one of these devices, please read on.

Faulty by Design
The Rocom devices seem to last about 12-18 months before going faulty. I suspect that its the flash cartridge but being a proprietary design means its not easily replaceable.

Requirements
Ideally the device will have no moving parts; we did away with the original devices (which were literally CD players) because they were unreliable and not remotley manageable.

All we really need it to do is

• play music on a loop
• automatically start after power interuption
• be remotely managable

Open source
The continued failure of device after device (we have about 70 of them accross EMEA) got me thinking, there must be a better way. I looked at Shuttle PCs but they failed the moving parts criteria (well there are ways but it didnt seem a good fit). Then my mind we to a very small fanless PC that i bought a couple of years back from Aleutia. So I took a look at the website to see if it was viable. The original device has now become the Aleutia T1

While the original device ran Puppy Linux but all the current ones run Ubuntu. Great, so the device is small, fanless and runs a very good, open source, operating system, and has a network port. So far so good.

Next I needed to work out if it would automatically start after a power outage. I dropped a quick email to the guys at Aleutia to see if this was possible and they very quickly responded to confirm that there was a BIOS setting for exactly this requirement. The final part was playing music on a loop. I was expecting it to be quite easy to acheive and I wasnt wrong.

The method of music playback I have gone for is called MPD (Music Playback Daemon), which is easily installable (its in the Ubuntu repos). I quickly installed MPD an uploaded an MP3 to the folder. Finally I added the MP3 to the playlist and set it to repeat and I was in business. Within 30 mins of unpacking the T1 I had it playing back music.

I shutdown the T1 and removed the power adaptor to test its ability to power on automatically. No sooner than I applied the power the device booted up, once the device had booted, MPD started playing the music – WIN

Final Steps
Now that I had a working device up and running, I need to think about how its supported within our company. I guess other people wouldnt be happy with SSHing into it to control it (which is really very simple actually). What I needed was a front end. Needless to say there are many front ends written for MPD. I went with a very simple web front end called MPDPlayer – its one of the many open source front ends listed on the wiki.

Ive done a little customisation of this and added a file upload button so that the whole process can be managed from the web interface.

Test Test Test
Im now in the process of testing and I do seem to have come accross a bug where playback stops after a number of days. I could just schedule a reboot of the device every night but I would prefer this to be a last resort. The MPD forums have given me some into on how to debug MPD, so I shall persue that.

Conclusion
So whats the catch? Well there doesnt seem to be one, plus this solution comes in nearly £100 cheaper than a Rocom and comes with a three year warranty rather than Rocoms 12 month one. Finally, as it uses a standard compact flash card, if it does go faulty, we can very easily replace it.

Overall Im really pleased with how easy its has been to “scracth my own itch” using existing open source projects. I intend to contribute my file upload button back to the MPDPlayer guys in the true Open Source fashion. Im also hoping that this experience will open my companies mind to using more open source solutions in future.

As ever I welcome your comments

OSG

Some of you may have noticed that this site was down for a little while. It seems my hosting company were victims of a massive incursion by malicious hackers and, at the time of writing, my original server still hasn’t been restored after 24 hours downtime.

While you have to feel sorry for them and all the extra work that they have been doing to rectify the issue now is a good time to go back over that age old question. Do you have a DR plan? Are you backing up, is your documentation up to date, have you tested a restore? Luckily I was in the process of documenting my setup when this happened and so my pain hasn’t been as great as I should imagine some others are experiencing

I think its also worth mentioning that, as I had no ETA of when my sites would be restored (or even if they could be restored by the provider) I moved everything into Amazons EC2 offering. This seems like an ideal platform for just such an occurrence, if you dont know how long your main site will be down you can very quickly get servers back on-line and then when and if your original platform is ready you can move back and you will only have had to pay for the hours/bandwidth that you have used.

If your on-line presence is important to you, and I cant think of many businesses that this doesn’t apply to, I would encourage you to look at adding something like Amazons Cloud offering to your DR strategy – and don’t forget to test, remember you only pay for the hours that you use and this is from as little as $0.10 an hour

OSG

For sometime now I have been of the opinion that email is broken. It worked at the time but now over 90% of email traversing the internet is spam. Sure, there are pretty good anti spam and anti virus systems but I honestly think we are just postponing the inevitable. I have had this conversation with friends many times and mostly they disagree but I honestly think we need something to replace email

Google Wave

Ive just watch the 80minute talk about Googles Wave and I think they really could be onto something. It combines rich interaction with very social features and its kind of an opt in model, like Facebook or Twitter, where you have to add people to your system. This means no unsolicited waves.

They have been working on this for two years and it looks really good. Dont take my word for it, go and check out the video here

Finally, and I have saved the best until last, they will be releasing it under open source so that you can set up your own Wave platform and it has federation built right in so that it will interoperate with other Wave platforms brilliantly

Lets hope this finally kills off email – it had a good innings but its time for it to go now

OSG